Michigan Bird and Game Breeders Association 

Below are a few articles I'm sure you will find interesting.
The articles are excerpted from our newsletters:

Fixing Angel Wing

by Shane Risner

One of the most frustrating things a breeder can have happen is for one of their most prized animals to develop a problem. A problem that seems to be common in waterfowl and seems to happen more so in call ducks than any other kinds of ducks is angel wing. Angel wing is when the wing either droops down or hangs out away from the bird’s body. It usually occurs for three reasons: incubation problems with temperature or humidity, too much protein in a duck’s diet, or inbreeding. This is an awful looking thing for a bird as it does not look normal but there are a couple of easy remedies to help cure the problem but they need to be done as soon as the angel wing is noticed.

The first remedy is to take the bird and wrap duct tape around its body in a firm position so that the wing is held in the normal place. The ligaments in the wing will strengthen and the angel wing should disappear after a couple of weeks.

One other method that has been successful for other breeders requires a little less tape. The breeder take the wing and tapes it in a normal position by taping around the wing in the tucked position. This should allow the ligament to strengthen and cure the angel wing.

If a breeder figures out the problem is too much protein. One of the above methods needs to be paired up with the reduction of protein. The bird needs to go on a green diet with a reduced level of protein. Alfalfa pellets are a good source of greens with low protein.

Putting our Best Foot Forward at Sales

by Sandy Councell

The way sellers and buyers treat or appear to treat animals/birds at sales can leave a good or bad taste in an observer’s mouth. MBGBA sales are open to the public. The public, however, has varying opinions about raising and breeding animals and birds.

Frequently fair boards that oversee the fairgrounds rented, walk the fairgrounds reviewing stock to ensure everything meets their standards. Plus if we took the public and the fair boards out of the picture, MBGBA has a code of ethics subscribed to in our constitution that addresses the sale of stock.
Basic husbandry practices can avoid conflict with the public, fair boards or MBGBA. It is important to note that often what a breeder does may not be inhumane to a bird/animal, but may be seen as inhumane by someone else.

For example:
• Carrying a bird by their legs or in a gunnysack may not hurt the bird, but is offensive to some. Better to use a box or cage.
• Feed and water may not be essential for animals/birds health at the sales. However, the MBGBA Seller Registration “recommends sellers provide all birds and animals with feed and water containers suitable in size for each box.”
• Soiled cages may not harm animals/birds, but the better stock looks, the faster it will sell at the highest price. Bedding and attention to the type of floor used in the cage can improve appearance.
• Crowding is the number one concern voiced. Give animals / birds room to move which will allows buyers ample room to view your stock.
• Remove sick or wounded birds /animals from sales area and from the public’s view. Birds/animals may be wounded because of cage design. Padded ceilings often protect birds from injure.
• Birds/animals may be purchased for human consumption or dog training. Avoid talking in public about such plans.
• Birds/animals should never be killed for any reason at a sale.

If booth or stock conditions concern you, see an MBGBA director. Two directors will review the issue. If they are unsatisfied with the standards or conditions at a seller’s booth, they will speak directly with the seller and attempt to remedy the situation.

It is a very rare case when an agreement cannot be reached. In this case, the seller’s fee will be refunded, and seller asked to leave.

MBGBA Constitution outlines this code of ethics by stating “members shall subscribe to ethical conduct:
• In breeding practices and care of owned animals.
• Honestly representing animals and birds presented for sale to sell healthy disease-free stock.
• For obtaining and selling of game, rare, and domestic birds and animals.
• In business affairs so to instill trust and satisfaction.”

MBGBA sales have a good reputation with the public, sellers, buyers and fair boards. It’s up to each of us to maintain that reputation at each and every sale in each and every booth.

Putting the Flock to Work

By: Harvey Ussery

Reprinted from Backyard Poultry Volume 4, Number 6 Dec 2009/Jan 2010

A Win-Win Proposition

If you’re a reader of Backyard Poultry, likely it’s because you love your birds---because they’re fun; they’re great “therapy” for the stress of hectic days; and they bring us back into connection with the natural world if we get lost in the cocoon of our man-made environment.  And then there are the bonuses for the table:  eggs and dressed poultry of a quality those dependent on supermarket imitations can only dream of.

But there are other benefits to be had from our feathered friends as well—we can “put them to work” as partners in the larger homesteading, self-sufficiency enterprise.  Please note that I’m not proposing a high-stress exploitation of fowl species, such as we see in the poultry industry.  Happily, putting the flock to work most often means allowing our birds maximum opportunity to do what they most want to do in any case, expressing natural behaviors and what Joel Salatin calls their inherent “chicken-ness” or (“duck-ness,’ etc.).  Our birds want to spend their time at work, preferably in the open air and sunshine, exercising and satisfying their curiosity while finding interesting things to eat.  The healthiest, most contented flock is precisely the flock that is working hardest for us in useful homestead projects. 

Another hint that “working” the flock is our best option:  All the working-flock strategies I’ve tried are effective precisely because the birds are seeking out natural foods that are superior to anything we can buy in a bag, the “reward” we offer in exchange for the work they do for us.  So not only does the working flock spare us labor we’d otherwise have to do ourselves, the feed dollars they save are a welcome bonus indeed.

There are ecological pluses as well:  The droppings of the working flock feed the soil food web and enhance soil fertility.  And with a bunch of bug-eaters busy in the backyard, we’re unlikely to “go nuclear” with toxic responses to insect threats in the garden and orchard.

Truly, the working flock is a win-win proposition in every way. 

Accessorizing the Working Flock

Some of the following strategies for putting the flock to work will not be appropriate at all scales.  However, flocks at any scale can be used to do productive work.  Success will depend on accessories appropriate to our scale and context—and on creative management.  For “flocksters” without serious predation challenges or close neighbors, complete free-ranging of the flock may be the easiest way to put them to work.  On the other hand, require a degree of confinement to make them work.  Most of us will choose among the following options to accessorize the working flock.

Electronet:

Electric net fencing is the only thing approaching “high tech” in my poultry bag of tricks, but it is a fundamental management tool I use in all the strategies below. Initial investment in electronet and energiezer is substantial, but with good care the system will last for many years.  Rolls of netting (typically 165 feet long) are easy to set up and move, and can be clipped together to enclose larger areas.  The larger the area, the more advisable the use of a charger connected to household current (rather than a battery).

Pasture Pen:

On a smaller scale, working flocks on pasture can be protected and contained using non-electric netting, or wire/frame panels that bolt together for ease of setting up and rotation to new sections.  An especially ingenious system is that of my friend Cody Lesser of Orlean, Virginia, featuring a small shelter on a wagon chassis that “docks” into a separately moved, wheeled wire-on-frame pen.

Chicken Tractor:

Andy Lee’s “chicken tractor” is a great option for a working flock of 6-10 chickens or so, offering employment for the working flock in both garden and pasture.

The Static Run:

I do not like the all-too-typical static chicken run, but of course many flocksters have no other option.  In this case as well, however, the clock can do productive work for us in even the smallest attached run—a much better option than keeping them shut up in a coop.  I can’t imagine any situation in which continual confinement inside a coop is our only choice, if we remember the option of building the coop as an “upstairs” over a small wire-enclosed run at ground level.

Insect Control

How can it be that our great-grandparents raised abundant crops of fruits and vegetables without the use of toxins more appropriate to chemical warfare than to the home garden—yet vendors of such products would have us believe that their use is a necessity if we are to win the “war” with the insect world?  I suspect the answer has much to do with the fact that every “small holding” had a flock of busy, free-ranging chickens who helped teach damaging insect populations a little respect.  We can return to that sensible model, using the services of our own backyard flocks.

It’s hard to imagine making this strategy work without the use of either electronet or total free-ranging—the birds have to be unrestrained enough to pursue the insects, which they can’t do confined to a chicken tractor or pasture pen.  But a single roll of electronet—at most two—should enclose most home orchards.  In addition to catching perching and flying fruit-damaging insects—I’ve seen my guineas take coddling moths right out the air—the birds help clean up dropped fruit, which may harbor the larval stage of competitor insects.  Geese are especially fond of dropped fruit, and help break the life cycle not only of damaging insects but of diseases as well, the spores of which may overwinter in fallen fruit.  (Do note that I don’t recommend leaving the flock on the orchard the entire season:  Their droppings can contribute too much fertility, encouraging fireblight in apples and pears.  Bug-patrol stints in the spring, when damaging insects are most active, and another in the fall, when many species head for winter sites underground, are a better choice.)

Chickens cannot be given free rein in the garden in the growing season:  Their incessant scratching would wreak havoc; and they like many of our favorite crop plants as much as we do.  However, I often net chickens onto the garden in the pre-season.  They “sanitize” it of slugs and slug eggs so thoroughly, it takes the slug population months to recover to damaging levels.  I net guineas onto a separate garden plot in which I grow squash (both vining winter and bush summer types), trellised cucumbers, corn, sorghum, and sunflowers.  The guineas help control competitor insects---especially squash bug, the organic gardener’s bane—while leaving the plants themselves in peace.  (Guineas provided a patch of soft soil near their shelter will not dust-bathe elsewhere in the garden.)

I have read that a pair of free-ranging guineas can keep an acre entirely free of ticks.  Ranging turkeys can feed themselves while foraging for ticks and other insects.

Tillage 

I have a number of times used a power tiller to open up new garden ground in tough established sod over compacted clay.  With even the best tillers, the vibration, noise, and stink make for high-stress, joyless work.  Tackling this chore with the worst could mean a trip to the chiropractor---and perhaps a psychotherapist as well, to get over “shell shock.”

And I have at least three times turned more than 1,600 square feet of heavy sod into productive garden using a flock of chickens as my tillers.  Chicken power wins, hands down.

At the larger scale, electronet is again just what is needed—a single roll of netting will enclose a square 41 feet per side, for a working area of almost 1,700 square feet.  Of course, that’s a tillage chore beyond the scope of half a dozen layers, however determined—I’ve used several dozens for a plot this size.

Smaller groups of tiller chickens are more suited to employment in a chicken tractor.  Mine is 4 feet by 10.  With 8 to 10 birds inside, it’s surprising how quickly they dispose of the sod cover.  (How long they actually take to do the job—whether in electronet or a “tractor”—depends not only on the number of birds, but on the nature of the sod, soil type and moisture level, etc.)

I do more cover cropping every year, and hope you do as well.  For tilling in cover crops, we can again choose either the power tiller—ever tried tilling 36-inch rye, with the tines fowling every few minutes?  -- or chicken power.  The chickens are happy tilling in even the tallest and toughest cover crops, or “fighting the jungle” in the most heavily weed-grown patches. 

Of course, a weedy or cover-cropped area might be large enough to net for this work.  But in the garden itself, the chicken tractor really comes into its own.  If sized to fit one of your garden beds (you do grow in wide beds, I assume?), you can safely work one bed with your tiller chickens, while adjacent beds remain safely inaccessible to them.

And don’t forget additional advantages of tilling with chickens not available from a machine:  Mechanical tillage breaks down the “crumb” structure of fine garden soil, and mixes together the layers that develop in a natural soil profile.  Chickens scratch at the surface layer only, without disrupting soil structure.  Tiller chickens boost soil life and fertility with the droppings they generously turn in as they work.  And tillage offers a smorgasbord of free feed:  fresh greenery; animal foods like earthworms and soil-line insects; and even an abundance of nutritious seeds if we allow cover crops like buckwheat, small grains, and cowpeas to mature before “sending in the chickens.”

Composting

What is the best way to deal with “incoming” from our poultry flocks—their droppings?  Laboriously scrape them off the floor of the coop and compost them?  I get tired just thinking about it.  Why not let the birds do the work of proper manure management themselves?

Even a flock completely confined in a coop can do most of the work of manure management.  A deep organic litter, constantly turned by the chickens, absorbs the droppings, their nitrogen content serving as “fuel” for the microbes breaking down the litter’s carbon content, reading the return to earth (a.k.a. our gardens) to power fertility cycles.  Sounds a lot like composting, which I thought was a lot of work.

If the litter is over a wood or concrete floor, we will still have to complete the process ourselves, using a variation on Sir Albert Howard’s compost heap.  I much prefer saving additional labor with a deep litter over an earth floor.  In this case, by the time the chickens have completely pulverized the manure-enriched litter, it has “mellowed” sufficiently to be used directly in the garden as a finished compost.  Additional benefits accrue in this model, which is much more conducive for microbes driving the litter’s breakdown.  As the litter becomes more bioactive, the chickens get more and more intrigued with interesting things to eat in it—I’ve never been quite sure what.  But studies have proven that chickens reap positive feeding and health-promoting benefits (vitamins B12 and K, immune-enhancing compounds, and more) out of whatever it is they find to eat in a “ripening” deep litter.

But there is so much more our composting chickens can do for us, and for the soil fertility project, if we take the deep litter concept outside.  Last year I experimented with throwing every last shred of what I would normally use to make classic compost heaps into an enclosed chicken yard---spent crop plants, prunings from flower beds, manure and “stable sweepings” from a neighbor’s horse operation, spoiled hay, straw, etc.  No balancing of “browns” and “greens” (carbon and nitrogen) and calibrating moisture content in a carefully assemble heap---and no laborious shredding and turning—I simply threw the flock all organic debris looking for a good home, and let them do the work.  After a couple of months, “the girls” became more interested in working that heap than hanging around the feeder.  And this fall I “harvested” countless wheelbarrow loads of chicken-powered compost for fall crops, and for enhancing overwinter cover crops in preparation for crops next spring.  I haven’t had such a gracious plenty of compost for years. 

Compost-making is also good work for the winter flock.  I keep the same mixed debris on a winter exercise yard.  Again, the chickens enjoy being outside in all but the nastiest weather, turning that deep organic duff into compost, finding good stuff to eat, and tidily taking care of their own manure reclamation.  Since my winter flock yard is on a garden plot, come spring, I don’t even have to haul the compost—it’s already applied to soil that has been cozy under its protection through the winter-and spring planting is off to an easy start!!!!